The Parker House: Ghostly Guests

The list of famous people who stayed at the Parker House is astounding. Charles Dickens gave his first public reading of A Christmas Carol while a guest there. While staying at the Parker House, actor John Wilkes booth practiced his pistol-shooting at a nearby firing range. Years later, a widowed Mary Todd Lincoln was a guest as well.

From politicians (Ulysses S. Grant, Ross Perot, JFK) to actors and celebrities (Judy Garland, the Grateful Dead, Emeril Lagasse), scores of well-known people have stayed at the Parker House.

However, the identity of its long-time ghostly guests is less certain.

A man dressed in Victorian clothing has been seen on the ninth and tenth floors. He appears solid for only a moment before fading away. Hotel lore says it is the ghost of found Harry Parker. Since this ghost once appeared at the foot of a guest's bed and asked if she liked her room, that seems like a good guess. Perceptive visitors to the ninth and tenth floors have also reported seeing orbs of white light floating in the hallway.

Apparently the third floor also has its share of supernatural activity. For many years the elevator would invariably stop on this floor, even when no one was visible. The famous actress Charlotte Cushman often stayed on the third floor, and died there in 1876. Hotel lore naturally blames the faulty elevator on her post-mortem dramatics, but I think the jury's out on which ghost is to blame.

On the same floor, guest room 303 was allegedly where a traveling liquor salesman killed himself. Guests and staff alike complained about the strange laughter heard in the room, and scent of whiskey that never left. To add to the general creepiness, strange shadows were seen on the walls and the water in the bathroom would turn itself on and off. Rather than rent out the room to thrill-seekers, the hotel management took a different approach and turned the room into a storage closet. This stopped the supernatural activity. Not even a suicidal liquor salesman wants to spend eternity haunting a closet!

The information about famous guests is from Susan Wilson's The Omni Parker House. A Brief History of America's Longest Continuously Operating Hotel. I found the ghost stories in Cheri Revai's Haunted Massachusetts.

The Parker House: Boston Cream Pie, Ho Chi Minh and Malcolm X

Boston's Omni Parker House hotel, founded in 1855, is America's longest continuously operating hotel. Needless to say it's full of strange lore.

Did you know that Boston cream pie was invented at the Parker House? It's true. To help put his new hotel on the map Harry Parker, the hotel's founder, hired a French chef named Sanzian for a salary of $5,000. This was extremely high for the mid-19th century but I guess Parker's investment was worth it. Sanzian impressed local gourmands with dishes like aspic of oysters, mongrel goose, and ham in champagne sauce.

The icing on the cake, though, was his creation of Boston cream pie. Bostonians had been eating pastries and cream for many years, and used chocolate as a beverage or in puddings. But when Sanzian combined the three into one dessert people couldn't believe their taste buds. He had achieved culinary immortality.

The legislature declared Boston cream pie the official dessert of Massachusetts in 1996 (it beat out Indian pudding), and in 2005 to celebrate their 150th anniversary the Parker House baked a Boston cream pie that was sixteen feet across. It contained more than two million calorie.

Since Boston cream pie is really a cake, why is it called a pie? According to this site, most Americans did not have cake pans in the 19th century, but they did have pie pans. I guess anything that was bigger than a cookie and baked in a pan was called a pie!

Guests of the Parker House in 1912 and 1913 may have eaten Boston cream pie made by Ho Chi Minh, the future Communist leader of North Vietnam who opposed the U.S. during the Vietnam war. Born in 1890, he had fled Vietnam (then called French Indochina) to avoid persecution for his political beliefs. He wound up in Boston working in the hotel's kitchen as a pastry chef. I guess he opposed the French colonialists in Vietnam, but had still absorbed their baking skills! This sounds like a tall tale, but is true. In 2005 officials from the Vietnamese government visited the hotel kitchen where Ho Chi Minh worked. I'm not sure if they arrived in time to eat any of that sixteen foot Boston cream pie.

One other famous revolutionary worked at the Parker House restaurant. Malcolm X (then known as Malcolm Little) worked there as a busboy during the 1940s. That's a lot of activism coming out of one kitchen. I think the moral here is to always tip your server well because you never know when they might start a revolution.

I got all this information from Susan Wilson's The Omni Parker House. A Brief History of America's Longest Continuously Operating Hotel.